Dennis Eckersley - The Covid Column

Shank sits down with the former (and current!) Red Sox ace, who reveals he caught the Wuhan Flu a few months ago:

It began in America one year ago. The Utah Jazz’s Rudy Gobert got the coronavirus and the NBA shut down. We learned that American icon Tom Hanks and his wife tested positive for the virus while filming in Australia. The world as we knew it was over.

Fast-forward 12 months and I am talking with Hall of Fame pitcher Dennis Eckersley, a man Red Sox fans love to hear when NESN games are broadcast into our homes. In the middle of a casual conversation about the suspect 2021 Sox, I ask Eck how his winter went and he tells me, “It’s been good, but I got COVID, for [expletive] sake.

“I got it Jan. 4. I was on the West Coast visiting my daughter and her kids. I didn’t see the grandkids two days prior to finding out. It could have been a disaster if I gave it to my daughter or her kids.

Who are at far less overall risk because of their age, but go on...

“I had a feeling. I had been around somebody that had it and he called me and said he and his wife had it. I said, ‘Really?’ Two days later, I felt something. I went in, got tested, I had it.

“I had like a mild fever for 10 days and that’s all I had. It was annoying, but I couldn’t be annoyed because I didn’t have it that bad.

“It wasn’t pretty. I never felt right for a month. But I feel lucky. It can happen to anyone.’’

It can happen to anyone.

A year into this awful thing, that is still the message (from a media dinosaur with zero knowledge of remedial measures - ed), and we cannot let our guard down. Eckersley got his first vaccine shot last Friday.

I still have a serious lack of appreciation / hatred for this purposeful fearmongering. I'd like to know if either Shank or The Eck were taking any of the following during the whole 'pandemic' - selenium, zinc and / or Vitamin D3. Full disclosure requires me to state that selenium started for me by April of 2020, I was already taking zinc by January 2020 and I started taking D3 about two months ago. And why is that? It's because I looked this shit up so I could figure out a way to prevent myself from getting sick, and so far it's worked. Admittedly the decision to start taking zinc looks like dumb luck in retrospect given that I was taking it two months before the start of the panic pandemic, but not the other two. If you're not boosting your immune system, you have worse odds for getting sick by this and other things.

Cheap and shitty panic induction like this doesn't help in any fashion and has been the number one reason I've always disliked and distrusted the media industry. What's left of the Boston Globe's circulation numbers further validates this fact.